Earnest was the right word. Such an endeavour was a committed journey into gravity, into deep seriousness. Some of the diggers were civilian volunteers. Men and women of good humour started this work and felt like there would never be anything to laugh about again. They found many things. They found a partially damaged hearing aid, which was never attributed to any of the victims. They found the sandwich bar menu board, dented and bloody. There was a rumour that they had found a perfect human brain, completely exposed. They found an undamaged green linen skirt, which mystified the female dead were badly mangled and their clothes mostly in one perceptive individual spotted that it still bore a large price tag. They found clothes, wallets, toys, handbags, coats, shoes and boots, people, bits of people and things no one could identify.
A man called Francis, a father of two, found a small blue thing he could not recognize. He was about to throw it in the pile in which the discovered clothing lay when he realized that there was a scrap of blonde hair attached. His heart blew like another bomb and he dropped it in horror. It was a bit of a blue hat with a part of a little girl's skull attached. (It was later identified as a piece of the greater remains of Natalie Crawford.) He shouted to the others and sat back on some debris, breathing hard. A couple of firemen came over. Francis pointed to the small blue thing. One of them picked it up. The other patted him on the back. `You all right?'
Francis nodded, still puffing like a woman in labour. After a couple of breaths, he went back to work and started climbing again over the hill of rubble. It would have been better if a single man had found the small blue thing, or at least a man with no children. But Francis had those two daughters and an inappropriate gift for empathy. Within a couple of minutes he was holding his hands in front of his mouth and nose and sobbing like a beaten was also a sloppy thinker and had no real grasp of history or politics.
Such inadequacies were common at the bomb-site. A fair few were also obvious at the two hospitals, which dealt with casualties and fatalities. The Accident and Emergency Department at the City Hospital quickly came to look like a knacker's yard. Other everyday patients, who had come in with sprained ankles or slipped discs, reeled out in horror. In the mortuary, the bodies were laid out bit by bit, assembled slowly from the seventy or eighty pounds of unidentified tissue brought to them there. A difficult task because so much of it was scorched and shredded. Human flesh was famously illequipped for withstanding such conditions. What had flesh ever done to merit such treatment? The sins of the flesh must have been big sins for flesh to be treated so.
Such failings were evident also amongst the policemen and women sent to inform relatives of the identified dead. Appalling reluctance was shown to execute this task.
The only real professionalism was amongst the reporters and cameramen on the scene and at the hospitals. They demonstrated real vigour and real hunger for their job. They thrust cameras and microphones everywhere. One German journalist even pointed his microphone at a corpse on a gurney.The other local journalists laughed at that. They had stopped asking questions of the dead a long time before.
By midnight, many of those involved had returned home. The police, the paramedics and medics, the bereaved and the workers at the bomb-site. The day brought an odd unifying phenomenon to many of them. That night, many thought, while drinking a cup of coffee, brushing their teeth, watching a film or locking a door, What a strange thing to be doing after what I've seen. Many felt as though their insides were hairy and itching. It was a most unaccustomed feeling, one they could not explain.
There was another unifying phenomenon. All of those people possessed a new knowledge. For all their lack of understanding, they comprehended something of which they had been ignorant. Some had learnt a new respect for the fragility of flesh, some thought they had learnt something about the possibilities of human cruelty, but there was only one knowledge common to all.
They had all learnt that from revolution runs blood, runs all our human waters.
The Fountain Street dead were Rosemary Daye (hips and hair), Martin O'Hare (aspirant astronomer), Kevin McCafferty (unemployed, couldn't sing), Natalie (not a long story), Liz (liked Brad Pitt) and Margaret Crawford (resented washing dishes), John Mullen (never ate his salad and bacon bac uette), Angie Best (the owner, a forty-two-year-old divorcee with two children and a twenty-five-year-old lover she was about to dump), William Patterson (never niet hinm), Patrick Somebodyor-other, a woman called Smith and six unnamed others. The list is pointless. The list is easily forgotten.
Named, unnamed. Remembered, forgotten. They all did that trick the dead do. Whether they died immediately, more or less immediately or later, they all did that trick. From living human to fastest transition in the world.
To sum them up is pointless and impossible. When she was twenty-two, Angie Best passed her driving test and experienced an ecstasy and sense of freedom so extraordinary that no subsequent experience ever matched its intensity. Her driving-test examiner, a man called Murray, remembered her joy for the rest of his life. He liked to recall her on rainy Wednesdays when he'd had to fail more than one candidate.
They all had stories. But they weren't short stories. They shouldn't have been short stories. They should each have been novels, profound, delightful novels, eight hundred pages or more. And not just the lives of the victims but the lives they touched, the networks of friendship and intimacy and relation that tied them to those they loved and who loved them, those they knew and who knew them. What great complexity. What richness.
What had happened? A simple event. The traffic of history and politics had bottlenecked. An individual or individuals had decided that reaction was necessary. Some stories had been shortened. Some stories had been ended. A confident editorial decision had been taken.
It had been easy.
The pages that follow are light with their loss.The text is less dense, the city is smaller.
Twelve
But Fountain Street is an incidental detail. The site itself is a distraction, the event, in some ways, an irrelevance, the toll a technicality. Such bombings, such murders do not really involve the people involved. The deaths and the maimings are a meaningless by-product. The victims are mostly random, entirely obscure. No one is interested in them. Certainly not the bombers. It is the rest of us who matter.
Such events are a message. They are designed and supposed to tell us something. To show us something, at any rate. The actions are not ends in themselves. They are demonstrations. Look at what we can do, they say. Look at what we can do to you.
We are terrified. We are meant to be terrified. That is why it is called terrorism.
Thus the reaction of the general citizenry is the substance of such events, the product, the commodity in this robust PR. And the reaction of the citizenry was this:
Jake Jackson, Ronnie Clay and Rajinder Singh had all comprehended the fact of the explosion at one and the same time. At 1.15 p.m. they stood or sat on the roof of the Europa Hotel with their workmates, lunchboxes on their laps, sandwiches to hand and mouth. They heard the unmuffled bang of a proximate detonation. There was a mild waft in the air. Several went to the edge of the roof and looked about them.
`Came from over there,' suggested Ronnie, pointing westwards towards the Grosvenor Road.
Rajinder gestured towards the city centre where they could see a large dark ball of dust linger, tremble and disperse in the mild breeze.
`Where's that?' asked Billy.
`Castle Street,' said one.
`Nah, Royal Avenue,' suggested Ronnie.
`Looks big,' said Jake.
A siren began to wail, building pitch and volume.
`Didn't hear any sirens before, said one man.
`Does that mean there was no warning?' asked Rajinder.
'Who knows?' answered Jake. `They don't need sirens to evacuate buildings for a bomb scare'
The men looked at one another silently. Several returned to their original positions and recommenced their luncheon. Ronnie shrugg
ed his shoulders and joined them. After a couple of minutes, only Jake and Rajinder were left at the edge of the roof. For some time they stared towards where they could still see the remnants of the dust cloud linger in the air like a stain.
Rajinder looked at Jake uncertainly. `I have a bad feeling.'
Jake glanced back at the ebbing dust plume. 'I hope you're the only one!
In common with 84,637 other people in Northern Ireland, Luke Findlater discovered that a big blast had occurred in the very first radio report of the incident on that day. Every lunchtime he listened to an eccentric agricultural programme on Radio Ulster called Farming Ulster Update. He heard, with delight, items about silage management, pig-farming and sheep-dip. The Englishman knew that it was probably some crass patrician taste for obscure kitsch but it genuinely charmed him.
Within only twelve minutes of the explosion in Fountain Street, the presenter of this programme had stopped speaking, fumbled with some paper and announced in an uncertain voice that he had received unconfirmed reports of a serious explosion in Belfast city centre and that several people had been killed.
The man's voice, so associated with the risibly mundane matters of manure and chicken-crops, formed those words strangely. The effect was disturbing. Luke felt cold. He sat back in his chair with a peculiar sensation. He looked around the office. He had not lived long enough in Northern Ireland to find such things usual, customary The furniture in his room, the very stationery seemed grotesquely commonplace under the circumstances.
Luke had been about to send a fax. Now he proceeded to send that fax. He stood by the machine, feeding the paper through, feeling the unaccountable, unanswerable consciousness of something inappropriate.
Fifteen minutes later, when Septic Ted learnt of the bomb he felt nothing quite so complicated as the feelings that had oppressed Luke. He was a veteran. He had lived in that city all his life. He knew several of the scores.
He had taken the day off work and was lounging on a sofa watching daytime television. He had nearly dozed off when the news flash appeared. He drank another mouthful of beer and burped acidly.
`Wankers,' he said.
Septic was not unfeeling. He was used to it.
Chuckle Lurgan learnt of the Fountain Street explosion thirty minutes after the event. He had gone home to have lunch with his mother. To his irritation, she had been absent and had not come back after an hour. He was driving back to the office from Eureka Street when his telephone had rather, parped thinly. Chuckie was yet too doubtful of the intricacies of driving to risk combining that task with a telephone conversation, delightful and flash though that would be. He pulled up on some Bedford Street double yellows and answered the call.
It was Luke Findlater. He told Chuckie how they had earned some money in the two hours since he'd been gone and how they were to earn more in the twenty minutes before he got back to the office. Chuckie, as always, liked to hear this but preferred not to be there. 'I've got to get some things in the city centre,' he said.'I'll park the car, do my stuff and see you in forty minutes.'
`That might be a problem. There's been a big explosion somewhere central. The centre might be cordoned off.'
'When?'
`Don't know. Not long ago.'
Chuckie hung up. He started the car and turned left at the bottom of Bedford Street, getting onto the wide square circuit of one-way traffic around the City Hall. As Luke had predicted, the police had laid stretches of white tape across the approach to Donegall Square. Chuckle's car became hemmed in as those behind him manoeuvred to change their route. He stared down the broad boulevard of Donegall Place. Groups of ambulances, fire engines and police cars clustered near the Bank of Ireland but he couldn't tell where the bomb had been.
A policeman held up the traffic so he could pass by. The man's face was pale and blank. Chuckie didn't like that look. He had seen it on policemen's faces before. Even at the periphery of such incidents, even hundreds of yards away, they often wore that numb, pallid expression.
Diverted, he turned left past the building he had always known as the College of Knowledge. He was irritated that his shopping plans had been dashed, but there was a small, indolent part of him that hoped no one had died.
Crab and Hally heard about the bomb nearly fifteen minutes after Chuckie. At two minutes before two o'clock they were in the van, just about to turn into the New Lodge, a Catholic area - a task which, they hated to admit, was more daunting since they had lost Jake, their conveniently Catholic colleague. They were listening to a song neither liked. Crab had just spotted a young woman in a tight skirt and had shouted something that had sounded to the woman like some meaningless elongated howl but which both Crab and Hally understood to represent the statement `I'd fuck ye any day of the week, big darlin'.'
They had laughed big fat laughs like the big fat men they were.
When they had stopped laughing they found that the song neither liked had ended and the two o'clock news had begun. An announcement was made about the Fountain Street bomb.
'Do you think it was one of theirs or one of ours?' said Crab to Hally.
`Do you think it got more of theirs or ours?' said Hally to Crab.
`City centre. Hard to say how many Taigs there'd be down there.!
`That place is near Castle Street. They're bound to be Taigs.'
'One of ours, then.'
`Aye.'
`Good one. Never too many dead Taigs. Fuck them.'
`Yeah, fuckers.'
They turned into the New Lodge and looked about those Catholic streets with a new sense of triumph.
And so it continued. The city's discovery of its shame was gradual, piecemeal, intermittent.
Slat Sloane had heard when a workmate told him. He had felt a pain and a shame that he couldn't quantify. He had thought of the dead, and his own tender flesh had puckered and tingled in sympathy with theirs.
Donal Deasely had found out when his office on the other side of town had been evacuated by the police. The city had ground to a halt because of several subsequent bomb-scares which the police had treated seriously, concerned about the possibility of a follow-up device. He had heard the earlier blast but it had sounded distant and no big deal. He had been surprised when one of the policeman told him about Fountain Street. He felt momentary shame about thinking it nothing.
Max, veteran of American violence, had been surprised. It had been her first big bomb. There had been many shootings, but she was American, she was used to that. The explosion confused her. What had it been for, exactly?'
policeman all he needed to know when his shift was sent to Fountain Street to secure the scene and protect forensic material. He spent two hours standing sixty yards away from the rubbled hole of the sandwich shop. After the first hour, he had given himself a sore neck from not turning in that direction.
Young Roche heard, hours later, when on his way home from school he met a boy he he had attended school that day. The boy told him that there'd been a big bomb down the town and that forty people had been killed. Roche had sold the boy three cigarettes for fifty pence before they parted.
Aoirghe, Matt and Mamie, Mary, even drunken old Tick all found out about Fountain Street in their various ways at their various times and to their varying degrees of horror or pity. Suzy, Rachel and several of the other women with whom Jake had failed to sleep also heard, learnt and discovered. By the time darkness fell, the knowledge had spread through Belfast with the imperceptible but unstoppable velocity of the fading light itself.
The knowledge permeated the city like weather, like a very local depression. That night's nightlife was desultory, hushed. Some had found the news heart-stopping, some had found it dull but there were few who had not found it. Some parents held their children in a tighter embrace that night, some lovers spoke more gently, even some fighters didn't quite fight. The citizens were busy, they couldn't think about it all the time but they thought about it all the same, and there were few who would not have wished it away if
they could.
The city and the citizens knew that this act had supposedly been committed on their behalf. A mandate was claimed. As the citizens fought, worked or idled their way through their evening, they almost all knew that no vote had been taken, no proposal put forward. Nearly every citizen thought privately, individually, No one asked me. It was a silent but complete unanimity. It was a silent but complete rejection.
The evening passed and the city grew darkly quiet once more. The southside shop-fronts, all the streetlit sidewalks became deserted. From up high, the city looked the same as it had looked the night before. There was one floodlit patch where you might spot rubble and searchers, but generally Belfast looked like it always looked.
The streets still glittered like jewels, like small strings of stars.
'I think she wet her bed last night,' said Chuckie.'When I went in this morning, the sheets were soaked.'
The doctor gazed at him without replying. Chuckie was growing irritable. The man had been staring at him in this manner for some minutes. Time was short and he was worried about his mother. 'I don't want her taking any more tranquillizers,' he said.
The doctor stopped his hand as it reached for his penpocket. He looked blankly at Chuckie.
Chuckie looked around the confines of the little kitchen in which they stood. He kept his temper.'Is it some kind of longlasting shock or something? Is she going to get better?'
The doctor gawped silently.
`Why are you looking at me like that?'